Can a man write from a woman’s perspective?
In a recent article, Maryann Johanson asserts that “throughout Western art, from the Renaissance painters through modern film, television, advertising, video-games, and comic books, there is an unspoken assumption underlying the vast majority of the work that the viewer/reader/consumer/player is male and heterosexual, because the creators have been and are, in the vast majority, male and heterosexual.”1
Following this assertion, the writer observes that this results in a limiting of our art and an impoverishment of our literature. This is an observation that Ursula Le Guin has also made when discussing her Earthsea fantasy fiction trilogy. Of the distinctly male bias, she says, “That’s how hero stories worked.”2
I imagine that this is why I found Dorris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook” so jarring. In it, women are their own entities, with motivations wholly outside the male world. To a man, this is hard to grasp and even harder to describe because it is always shocking to discover just how deeply self-interested women actually are, and to realise that their world does not revolve around men even though men may play an important role in their lives.
Is it possible for a man to write a story from a woman’s point of view? Superficially, the answer seems to be “yes” but there are some innate, emergent properties of such a point of view–deeply nuanced realities–that are mostly out of the male grasp.
For example, in “The Golden Notebook”, there is a scene in which Lessing describes her protagonist’s period. She describes how Anna spends several days worrying that the smell of her blood is noticeable to those around her. She visits the rest-room more than usual and feels nervous that people will notice her numerous toilette visits. In the rest-room, she washes and perfumes herself in a mechanical, habitual manner but conscious that she has to mask the smell. Lessing describes all this so deftly that the reader empathises deeply with the character. She describes it with such finesse that a man reading it feels like he has been shown the very heart of what it feels like to be a woman. The scene is even more powerful because her worries are mostly unfounded. The men she works with don’t actually notice any smell or that she is even having her period. Only she is conscious of her body’s strangeness and slight repulsiveness, because she lives with this plight every month of every year, and responds to it in a uniquely self-conscious manner.
Now, it might be possible for a man to write such a story but it would require a complete abandonment of the male intellectual machinery that we are naturally equipped with. To see what a woman sees and to care about what a woman cares about would require that we first respect the fact that her cares are completely different from our own. In writing such a story, the first task would be to remove every one of our assumptions wherever we find them. If the story does not leave us with the understanding that women are nothing like men, then it is not written with the female gaze.
Other pertinent questions we might want to ponder are: What concrete properties are needed in order to understand the female perspective? Is it worthwhile for men to attempt to write from an authentic female perspective?
